Blog Archive

DIY Programmable LED Hula Hoop
The hula hoop in motion I've always really wanted a programmable hula hoop and there are a number of LED hula hoops available online. You can get one that you program with a remote for $300 c...
Geek’s Guide to Menstrual Cups
What is a Menstrual Cup? A menstrual cup is a small cup (usually made of silicone) that sits in the vaginal canal to collect menstrual fluid. They can be disposable and generally come in t...
Blender Rigify to Unity Ragdoll
Some files to help you along: body.blend: a very simple humanoid model unity-ready.blend: an already rigged model if you want to skip to the unity part ragdoll-tutorial.unitypackage: unit...
What I Learned From Working on a Game Every Day for 30+ Days
As of writing my github commit streak is 37 days. I didn't start out thinking about trying to work on something everyday - I just wanted to work on a game in unity. However, I guess I got a little...
Riot Code Grrrl Manifesto
RIOT CODE GRRRL MANIFESTO zine Just download a PDF for your selected format and print (two sided is way better, but if you can't print that way you can still enjoy). Download: Two Sided...
The Spirit of Burrito Saturday
There's some question to the value of academic education within the tech field. Degrees aren't exactly required if you have the clout, privilege, and silver tongue to demonstrate your skills ...
Bernoulli and Ada Sitting in a Tree...
Ada Lovelace is credited with writing the very first computer program. This program was for Babbage's Analytical Engine and calculated Bernoulli numbers. Bernoulli numbers have the following m...
Pride, Prejudice, Dungeons, and Dragons
I've worked a bit in the past with Markov chains, but recently they've become really popular for creating twitter bots. However, I wanted to try something a little different than the norm so inste...
My LED Heart
I recently took my first dive into soldering with Adafruit's MiniPOV 3 Kit. To my surprise I got it working and also didn't burn myself in the process. Device just after soldering My next...
Phasers Set to Kill
I like trying out a lot of different game frameworks and seeing how they stack up to each other. My current favorite is LÖVE which is really awesome for desktop games, but it's slightly more chall...
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Release a Game
I've been working on small games for quite awhile now, but I never thought they were good enough or interesting enough for me to actually release into the wild for other people to play. I felt the...
Working Remotely
I've been working remotely for more than a year now. There's a lot of pitfalls that people warn you about when you start working remotely, mostly loneliness and feeling isolated, however, I never ...
To All the Comics I've Loved This Year
A stack of comic books I read comics quite a bit in the past, but I took a bit of a break. I was honestly exhausted with the same sorts of stories focusing on the same type of characters. Thi...
Building a Tech Community People Want to Be a Part Of
Error: no task for 'war' did you mean 'love'? So, I want to talk about assholes in local tech communities because I've seen them drive people out over and over. Let's be clear, most communiti...
Learn to Code
Writing code is a creative act. — Lindsey Bieda (@lindseybieda) July 5, 2014 We teach kids in school to write creatively, though most of them won't publish a great novel. — Lindsey Bieda (@...
Stages of Dealing With Sexism in Tech
1. Denial "There is no sexism problem they're just being over sensitive." Most of us start here. I started here. Some of us never leave here. I wasn't warned prior to starting programming th...
The Pipeline Problem and Attrition
Usually we model population growth with this basic model: population growth rate = incoming rate - attrition rate For the sake of this example we'll use the incoming rate as the number of w...
I LÖVE the Rain
Note: The following article is about love 0.9.0 which includes a couple changes to the particle system so the example code won't work anything below 0.9.0 One of the coolest things about LÖVE i...
A Little Bit of Animated Sprite LÖVE
I've been playing around with LÖVE lately and making a game with it. One of first problems I decided to solve was animated sprites so I decided to make an "object" (well really a table) to handle ...
I'm Not Immune to the Wrongs of White Feminism
Yesterday there was some discussion regarding the usage of "intersectional feminist" by white women and by the end of the discussion and by reading this (full original post) I came to agree. Howev...
When It's Death by 1000 Paper Cuts the Little Things Count
I learned early that sometimes being a software engineer means death by 1000 cuts because you don’t have the power to make it stop. Even the tiniest little things add up to something big – someti...
On Accepting Privilege
When people say 'privilege' they can mean many different things. For the rest of the article when I talk about privilege I am using the social justice definition to which privilege means the advan...
Stupid Programmer Tricks and Star Wars Gifs
Hard G vs Soft G Gifs, I love gifs and ssome of you may also know that I love Star Wars. At some point I tried to make and subtitle a gif by hand since I was unable to find what I was looking...
Config and Generators in Gems
If you've written a gem at some point you might want to have configuration options for those people using the gem. Luckily, this is relatively easy to do with a configure block. The code insid...
How to Gem Like Jem
I've been looking around for a super quick start guide to first gem using bundler step-by-step. I haven't found one so I decided to document my own process. If you want the canonical and more deta...
Answering the Sexism Question
"Just how bad is the sexism," a woman asks me. She's just starting to learn programming and looking to get into the field. She wants to know just what she is getting her self into. She's heard sto...
Abuse of the Abuse Button
TW: I will be talking about abuse and posting and discussing fairly terrible examples. This is a baby sloth gif to make sure content starts out further down. baby sloth yawning It's n...
Coding as Play
Side projects are important to a programmer. They are often the only means for expanding skill sets outside of work or school lives. However, side projects can be straining for those with limited ...
Ethnicity Trends in CS Bachelor Recipients
The following data is taken from the Taulbee Survey and goes from 2001-2011 just looking at the ethnicity trends for students receiving a CS bachelor degree (as a percent). The ethnicity...
How to Read Papers
When I started grad school lots of people had lot of advice for how to read academic papers. Recently, I found a blog entry that hits on the core of what everyone was telling me when it comes to r...
You Have No Idea What a Lynch Mob Is &Mdash; So Stop Saying It
Words, believe it or not, have meanings. Lately, many people have been using "lynch mob" to refer to a group of individuals calling people out for bad, disrespectful, out of place behavior. I shou...
Self-Reprogramming: Overcoming Stereotype Threat and Impostor Syndrome
First a couple definitions; Stereotype Threat: The experience of anxiety when a person has the chance to confirm a negative stereotype about their social group. Impostor Syndrome: When a p...
On Facts, Learning, and Reality
What we hold as facts or truth is what we have been told or by some other means gone out of our way to learn. As you learn more your idea of what is true changes. Your reality is not reality (nor ...
Git Collaboration Fun for Beginners
It's pretty easy to get started using git. TryGit is a really awesome introduction to the basic commands to get you started using git for version control. However, one of the awesome features of g...
In the Case of Brit Ruby We All Lose
Let me start by saying that I am constantly pushing for more diverse representation in the technology community. There have been a number of cases where people failed in being inclusive not intent...
The First Step
No real social change has ever been brought about without a revolution... revolution is but thought carried into action. - Emma Goldman Saying it's awesome to be a "girl" in tech is disi...
Git Shared Repo Woes
If you've ever gotten when trying to push to a shared repo: error: insufficient permission for adding an object to repository database ./objects You probably are new to setting up a shared...
Diversity and Women in Technology Resources
Articles My Technology Will Be Intersectional or It Will Be BULLSHIT!: Lightning Talk Edition Debugging The Problem Of Women In Tech The "Uppity Women" of Silicon Valley Researcher rev...
We Need You
We have all been there. We have all been made fun of, ostracized, and made to feel like we don't belong at one point in our lives. Many of us have used these experiences to strengthen ourselves, w...
Hard Having a Female Avatar on the Internet?
Is it hard having a female avatar on the internet? Do people take your arguments less seriously or sexually harass you. Never fear! The internet has the cure. Mustachify.me! Now you too can be...
A Game in 24 Hours
Iron Trotter without sound: OSGCC was absolutely amazing this year. The games made for it were all impressive. We had a kinect game, a tablet game, a vimscript game, and even a Dart game. Th...
Delicious Data &Mdash; Ethnicity of Computing and the U.S. Population
Ethnicity of BS degree recipients source: CRA Taulbee Survey Ethnicity of US population source: 2010 Census US vs. computing population ethnicities Updated: Changed graphs for...
Doing Good to Make Us Better
"It's such a transformative field for society as a whole. And without the involvement of a diverse group of people, the results of what we do are not going to be appealing or useful to all aspec...
The Elephant in the Computer Lab
The lack of women in the computing fields is something that is surprisingly controversial. I've dug through countless websites and threads following the discussion of this issue and found many arg...
Women in Computing Timeline &Mdash; A processing.js Visualization
Women in computing timeline I decided to work on a simple visualization of the timeline of women's contributions to the world of computing. It's largely based on this wikipedia article, but i...
Definition: Code Literacy
literacy -n 1. the ability to read and write 2. the ability to use language proficiently - World English Dictionary When I speak of code literacy...
Women in Computing Factsheet
BS Degrees by Field source: American Institute of Physics "The fraction of women among bachelor's graduates increased this year in all three areas (CS, CE and I), though only 13.8 percen...
Examining the Existing Attempts to Increase Code Literacy
Increasing code literacy has always been a real challenge and it is one more people are trying to solve now that there are fewer people going into the computing fields. There are two recent tools ...
The Importance of a Code Literate Culture
Note: I've moved the entire comment system over to disqus, the old comments on this entry have been archived here. There have been a lot of attempts in order to increase code literacy by fello...
rstat.us Share Bookmarklet
Most sites aren't going to have the ability to automatically share content on rstat.us. So, I decided to roll out a short and sweet bookmarklet to allow people to share content with ease. Just dra...
rstat.us: Building a Community on a Community
Recently some friends of mine along with myself found it desirable to move away from Twitter based on their policies and terms of service. Each of the existing alternatives had something major lac...
Tweeting From C#
Tweeting from any chunk of code has a slight increase in difficulty since all authentication to twitter must now be done with OAuth. Luckily there's a wide variety of libraries out there to help u...
An Interactive View of Prison Populations Using RGraph
RGraph is a toolkit for the creation of HTML5 canvas graphs. One of the most beneficial aspects of it is that it allows for user interaction with the graph data which allows whoever is using to al...
Fun With Narwhals, Corn, and D
This weekend I took part in a game programming competition at PITT, OSGCC. My team members (James LL and Jackie Kircher) and myself were given the themes of narwhals and corn to incorporate into o...
What the Hell Is an Exokernel?
I've worked a little bit on the exokernel project XOmB and very often I struggle to explain exactly what an exokernel is. So, here it is in simple to understand (and imperfect) car analogy. ...
Ada Lovelace and Women in Computing Today
Ada Lovelace is considered the world's first computer programmer. In the world of computer science today it's almost astonishing that computer programming could have first been done by a woman. Af...
Making Sense and Nonsense of Markov Chains
Andrey Markov is known for two things being a Russian Mathematician and having amazing facial hair (well probably not the latter, but I'd love to think so). A Markov chain is one way of describing...
Papers: Dynamic Programming With Zombies and Pirates
Dynamic Programming was developed by Richard Bellman while he was working for The RAND Corporation in the 1950’s. During this time The RAND Corporation was employed by the Air Force. In his autobi...